Hard News

go.”
    The first thing you think is, Hell, I’m still here
….
    The Model took a call. He nodded. Looked at Rune. “This is great! It’s an overturned ammonia tanker on the BQE. Boy, that is gonna screw up rush hour real nice. Ammonia. Are we lucky or are we lucky?”
    Rune shut the monitor off and joined the Model at his cluttered desk. “I think I want to see her.”
    “Her? Who?”
    “You know who I mean.”
    The Model’s face broke into a wrinkleless smile. “Not Her, capital H?”
    “Yeah.”
    The Model laughed. “Why?”
    Rune had learned one thing about TV news: Keep your back covered and your ideas to yourself—unless the station pays you to come up with ideas, which in her case they didn’t. So she said, “Career development.”
    The Model was at the door. “You miss this assignment, you won’t have any career to develop. It’s ammonia. You understand what I’m saying?”
    “Ammonia,” Rune repeated. She wound a paisley elastic silkie around her ponytail then pulled on a black leather jacket. The rest of her outfit was a black T-shirt, yellow stretch pants and cowboy boots. “Just give me ten minutes with capital H Her.”
    He took her by the arm, aimed her toward the door. “You think you’re just going to walk into Piper Sutton’s office?”
    “I’d knock first.”
    “Uh-uh. Let’s go, sweetheart. Double time. You can visit the lion’s den after we get back and wrap the edits.”
    A figure stepped out of the corridor, a young man in jeans and an expensive black shirt. He wore his hair long and floppy. Bradford Simpson was an intern, a Journalism School senior at Columbia, who’d started out in the mailroom his freshman year and was by now doing slightly more glamorous jobs around the station—like fetching coffee, handling deliveries of tapes and occasionally actually assisting a cameraman or sound crew. He was one of those madly ambitious sorts—Rune could identify with
that
part of him—but his ambition was to get his degree, don a Brooks Brothers suit and plunge into the ranks of corporate journalism. Sincere and well liked around the O&O and the Network, Bradford (“Don’t really care for ‘Brad’ “) was also cute as hell—in a preppy, Connecticut way. Rune had been shocked when he’d actually asked her out a few days ago.
    But while she appreciated the offer, Rune had found she didn’t do well dating people like Mr. Dockers Top-Sider here and, instead of his offer for dinner at the Yale Club, she’d opted to go film a fire in lower Manhattan for the
Live at Eleven
newscast. Still, she wondered if he’d ask her out again. No invitations were forthcoming at the moment, however, and he now merely looked at the screen, saw Randy Boggs’s lean face on the monitor and asked, “Who’s that?”
    “He’s in jail,” Rune explained. “But I think he’s innocent.”
    Bradford asked, “How come?”
    “Just a feeling.”
    “Rune,” said the Model. “We don’t have time. Let’s go.”
    She said to them both, “That’d be a pretty good story—getting an innocent man out of jail.”
    The young man nodded and said, “Journalists doing good deeds—that’s what it’s all about.”
    But the Model wasn’t interested in good deeds; he was interested in ammonia. “Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Rune,” he said like an impatient professor. “Now.”
    “Oh, the tanker truck,” Bradford said.
    “See?” the Model said to Rune.
“Everybody
knows about it. Let’s
move.”
    “It’s a goddamn traffic accident,” Rune protested. “I’m talking about an innocent man in jail for murder.”
    Bradford said, “There
is
something about him….” Nodding at the screen. “He looks more like a victim than a killer, if you ask me.”
    But before she could agree, the Model led her firmly to the elevator. They descended to the ground floor of the four-story building that occupied a whole square block on the Upper West Side. The building had been an armory at one time then had been bought by the Network, gutted and rebuilt. Outside, it was scabby and dark and looked like it ought to be housing a thousand homeless people; inside was a half-billion dollars’ worth of electronic equipment and TV celebrities. A lot of the space was leased to the local O&O station but most of it was for the Network, which recorded a couple of soap operas here, some talk shows, several sitcoms and, of course, Network News.
    In the equipment room beside the parking garage Rune checked out